Comment by edferda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edferda | Hacker News Reader

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Honest question, not trying to be confrontational, just curious every time I see these kind of posts/anecdotes.

It seems to me that finding a job in tech is easier than finding a job in any other professional field (e.g. chemical engineering). I am an electrical engineer myself and it was easier to get a job that paid better doing programming than in EE. Specially for the effort you have to put in.

How is it that HN complains so much about the whole process? Are people only applying to big tech companies or hot startups hoping to get the compensation they have been getting for the past n years?

There must be plenty of tech jobs in non tech industries doing normal, “boring” work like dba or maintaining legacy systems.

I mean, those kind of jobs still pay enough to live a normal, decent life. They might not be exciting but work is work. Although that is my take, coming from a 3rd world country and all.

Or am I just delusional and the “boring” jobs(that pay less but still enough) are nonexistent?

I am not from the US so I really don’t know how the market looks outside of the FAAANG/startup bubble. Heck, last time I checked even the US government needed tech folks. It feels that there are jobs out there but the jobs don’t match people’s expectation. But I could be really wrong.

Not trying to be confrontational either in answering your question. Just sharing an anecdote, since I have some experience working in a company that for a time, employed mostly EE as software engineers. I'll call this company Y (since the X alias is now prone to create confusion).

Y is entrenched in the business of producing monitoring tools for electrical systems (power systems, controllers, rt simulation, etc). Beyond very basic drivers and software to interface with their devices, the actual useful apps to work with them were always written by partner companies that were in the software business.

One day, Y found itself having to compete with a former partner (a software company) that had acquired one of Y's direct competitors (power systems, controllers, simulation, etc). Y then thought it was time they became less reliant on external software for their products and it made sense that they, too, entered the software business. The obvious next step was to reverse engineer and replicate some of the existing apps that were interfacing with their systems.

Y first tried to hire some SE for the job. But faced with the challenge of paying SE salaries, it was reasoned that since Y's existing EE have the academic prerequisite to code, they can probably do the job. A few meetings later, company management and the various EE managers all agreed that code is obviously code. Network, web, desktop, you name it, they can build. They can do it all.

Three years of technical debt later, they tried hiring actual SE who, upon interacting with the code, just kept leaving, for some reason. By the fourth year, those projects were scrapped and new ones started from scratch, with actual SE as project leaders and a few handpicked former-EE-turned-software-devs from the old teams.

All this to say that although EE can technically write code, building software, if done right, is a lot more than about simply spewing logic with a programming language. I'm not saying that an EE can't also become a qualified software dev, but once that happens, they'll want to be paid a software dev salary.

There are more jobs, but also a lot more weird stuff is thrown in. Overall, the industry treats it like hiring a single bad engineer will singlehandedly and inevitably sink your entire company.

And the "boring" jobs copy their recruiting practices from the FAANG companies. So you have a 5 round interview that could ghost you any time.

The current problem is that huge numbers of companies are in a hiring freeze, but still posting jobs on job boards, so you have to submit countless resumes to get a human to contact you.

So yes, there are a lot more jobs available, but every step seems designed to discourage and frustrate job seekers.

This rings true in my experience. I'm in the tech space, but my brother is a veterinarian. Find a job, he must comb through local newspapers, look for vet shops, ask friends/colleagues and maybe look in 3 or 4 job pages. And the pay is shit.

We in tech have it easy: upload your CV to LI and Indeed and hunt the postings there. Everything is concentrated in one place.

> We in tech have it easy: upload your CV to LI and Indeed and hunt the postings there. Everything is concentrated in one place.

This does not sound like someone who has been job hunting for software roles in the last few years.

I applied to ~60 positions that I think I was a strong fit for through linkedin and indeed and only heard back from 3. Only one of those actually followed through to an interview.

I also searched company careers pages manually and applied to 5 companies directly, which resulted in 4 interviews and 3 offers.

5 years of experience and all three offers were for ~$150k fwiw.

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